This ad will appear in Imax film theaters at the Museum as a way of introducing travel with experts to different corners of the world.  The design invokes the idea of windows into the world.  Each frame representing different ways individuals might see the same location – instilling the idea of individual experiences abroad.

“Be a leader, not a follower.” Growing up, we’ve all heard these very words from everyone from our proud parents to our game-day coaches to our grumpy 6th grade school teacher. Cliche? – maybe. But when taking this basic, sometimes over-stated tidbit of ‘life-changing’ advice, one needs to hear it out a little more. This very phrase has a significant correlation to the world of branding and the building of company identities and can have a lasting effect on the performance and longevity of your brand.

Many companies invest significant time, energy and capital in building a sustainable and effective brand identity, only to dilute their efforts by succumbing to occasional fleeting market trends and outside short-term influences. These kinds of key distractors can quickly derail a company’s deliberate efforts in building brand loyalty, recognition and market share.

When developing a brand, businesses and their brand managers need to discuss the ramifications of both short and long market trends. They should recognized that brands take time to develop. A visual identity can be developed in a few weeks, but an all-encompassing brand needs time to spread, saturate and mature within your target demographic. Making changes to their strategic brand goals based on short-term market trends can quickly dilute the core message originally embedded within the brand. Short-term market trends come and go quickly, making constant adjustments to your strategy a must. This will only hurt the effectiveness of your efforts to build brand recognition and awareness around your product/service within your market.

Don’t sidetrack into a survivalist mentality of chasing new avenues. Outside ‘influencers’ – like short-term trends – can become a source of brand derailment. Some companies will experience slow starts. Meaning, they won’t see the immediate effects of a developed brand identity and go into panic mode; looking to new channels to drive sales. Doing this as a ‘reactionary’ measure will simply slow things further. Looking to new demographics (different from the ones identified as the original target at launch) can damage the credibility of your brand with those that have the highest probability to identify with it. For example, if a new cell phone company were to experience slow sales and market recognition within the first six months of being on the market, should they redirect their marketing to the 65 and older audience if their phones cater to a Facebook and Twitter happy generation? Absolutely not. They’ll be marketing to an audience that is slower to adopt technology then a younger generation, and will be throwing marketing capital at an unresponsive demographic – further slowing progress and brand saturation. They would also lose credibility in younger potential customers by having their phones becoming associated with an older crowd. As we know, cell phone and smart phones have ‘street cred’ among friends. If they carry a certain aura about them (“You have that phone!? Isn’t that made for your grandparents!?!”) then their brand credibility can be quickly disowned by the very demographic that had originally been identified as the prime, spend-ready target audience.

Maintain a core brand message and fight tooth-and-nail to protect it. Don’t be a follower and chase trends to drive what ultimately is a false sense of pertinence. These trends are short lived and are quick to become passé. Don’t allow your brand to fall into this dark well of survival amongst fierce competition. Focus on the long term by being unique in your message, distinctive in your visual identity and don’t get distracted by tempting blips on the radar.

It’s one thing to produce a quick promotional brochure or a make-shift logo to begin your outreach to potential customers, but at what point does this begin to work against you and your business? Getting a new business started is always the hardest part. There’s so much to think about; supplies, staff, marketing, overhead, initiation costs, etc.

But the biggest error any new business owner can make is to put their branding and marketing on the back-burner. Even if you give 110% of your initial effort to product/service development to assure you’re offering something under demand and of top quality – without a strategic brand and outreach conceptualization, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. Half-baked identities and make-shift promotional materials built in Word will only serve to tell your clients and potential investors that you are a second-rate company who doesn’t value their own market image.

Whether you’re seeking new clientele or propogating financial investors, they’re all looking at your presentation of your product or service as a window into your business. Attention to detail, level of professionalism, and ultimately your market image are what can make or break you. Invest some capital, some effort and some time in developing your public image – your brand identity.

When building this identity, consider the merits of developing an outreach package that unifies your brand message. Carry a simple, concise market message, a distinctive visual design aesthetic and a core set of product values throughout each piece – whether in commercials, radio, brochures, electronic email campaigns, web, viral postings and any other creative medium. The more unified your outreach becomes, the better it will serve you and your business. People identify with brands in a number of ways. But the most influential emotional trigger to get customers to identify and interact with your offerings is through a single voice, a consistent message, and a repeating visual presence. If your outreach materials vary in look or message each time a prospecting customer interacts with It, they will fail to retain your message simply due to their subconscious not creating the correlation between your pieces.

Be calculated in your approach to how you market you new business. Give genuine thought ot how you communicate your message – and keep it unified across all your market collateral.

A bold, distinctive voice will create a thousand echoes -

Very few people aspire to change how the world works. Quite frankly it’s a daunting task. Even fewer people actually follow through on this aspiration. Steve Jobs was one of those people. Having started Apple Computers in his small California garage in the 1970s with ‘The Woz’ at his side, he didn’t just see a new computer company, he envisioned a systematic change in the way we interact and use personal computers to fulfill our lives. He was a visionary – able to predict what we wanted before we even knew we wanted it. He had extraordinary vision, bringing us revolutionary products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad – each redefining their respective categories in remarkably innovative ways. For those that knew him, worked for him, even read his biographies as I did, we know he was at times called a tyrant, a dictator. Depending on the source, he has been coined everything from a bully to a genius. But over the recent years, he quite simply proved to be the latter. If we could all have even half the drive, passion, and vision that he brought us, we’d be quite a remarkable race.

Mourn the loss of a great man, rejoice in the legacy of an “iCon”…

Whether starting a new business or revamping an existing one, the notion of brand building certainly merits some serious discussion. Thousands, if not millions of dollars are consistently spent on product development for good reason. A company can not enter a competitive marketplace with a marginal product line and expect to survive. Further monies are spent on infrastructure, resources and market research. Again, a company cannot expect to stay afloat without the systems in place to meet product demand and expected levels of client relations and customer service.

With that said, each company can only start the game with one complete pie, made up of the several pieces mentioned above. Companies both large and small will construct a different allotment of which pieces of their respective pies will be awarded the most resources to drive sales depending on their markets, their target demographics and even their short or long-term goals. Savvy entrepreneurs and company leaders will understand the merits in slotting a significant piece of pie to branding.

A company that invest measurable resources into building and maintaining a concise and unified brand image will ultimately survive in markets where those that have not will struggle, if not collapse. A well-developed brand is what will help a company and/or product establish a visual identity while establishing an emotional connectivity with a specific demographic they are trying to reach.

To do this, the brand should not be designed to appeal to everyone. This will dilute the message and render a brand that lacks focus and analytical comprehension of their market. A brand message designed to appeal to everyone will ultimately not appeal to many at all. Successful brands build their identity around individualism, not the masses. They focus on a specific group, usually identified through extensive data analysis. So identifying your market demographics and developing a brand image and message around a specific sub-group within a market will often pay dividends on product awareness and adoption. Building a brand image and message centered around specific demographics and target audiences can be difficult and time consuming, but is a worthwhile investment in the longevity of a company or product.

Once your brand has been established it shouldn’t be altered or changed. Just when a brand may seem to become boring or outdated is usually when your market is beginning to adopt it and identify with it. Remember that your brand is designed around your market, not the personal tastes of employees. Build it, and then protect it. Keep your marketing outreach unified to the core message. Brand unification drives brand recall. Recall is the key to succeeding in today’s competitive marketplace. Having your target audience retain your companies brand as a front-of-mind trigger will drive sales and customer loyalty in ways that weaker brands cannot.

The lesson here is simple. When starting a new brand, or redeveloping an existing one, spend real time and energy in developing a brand that is based on market data, analytics and specific audiences. Not only does this serve as a way to design a brand that your customers will identify with and relate to, but it will also provide you with valuable insight into your market, their spending habits and emotional triggers along the way. This is insight that can’t be found through any other process.

This was a proposal design done for a client to present to the National gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The idea behind the design was to reflect a look and feel that was inline with the Museum’s identity.

This is an example of a recent clothing catalog designed for Golden Island Gear – a tropical themed t-shirt and beach wear company. They needed a catalog they could feature online and in print to really showcase their clothing line and translate a certain “island life” mentality to really hit home with their potential customers. We chose colorful island and beach images of people in their demographics to help translate their beachy image and organic clothing line.

This is a recent brochure designed for Smithsonian Journeys for an upcoming tour to Italy to witness the famous Stradivari violins being played in a special event. The layout was done in such a way that it would lend to both printing and for downloading from the internet.

According to those quoted in the best selling novel, “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, the average person is subjected to over 250 commercial ads on a daily basis. There’s no question that’s a significant hill to climb as a business owner hoping to generate brand awareness or gain market exposure.

Within the myriad of logos and brand identities we’re witness to on a daily basis, less then 4% of them succeed in actually capturing attention (or sticking) in the minds of a passers-by in an effective, memorable way. Too many entrepreneurs and larger companies have dismissed the weight of a well designed logo as a trivial expense or unimportant to their goals.

Consider the aesthetic – Whether a designer or not, we can each think of businesses we pass by every day that quite frankly haven’t given their market image much thought. We’ve all seen them; cartoon-like renditions of some cute, cuddly animal or borrowed symbol from some unlicensed artwork. These scream amateur to a prospecting client. They’ll wonder if the product or service have been given any more attention then the lack-luster identity presented to them. A designer will help you develop a visually pleasing design while keeping your message in mind. Use them wisely.

Consider correlations – One also needs to recognize cognitive and subconscious visual associations people make with shapes, objects and imagery. Many identities/logos have adopted a specific visual reference, but the designer and/or the client haven’t heavily weighed the possibilities of it meaning one thing to them, while another to their target audience. An example you say! Alright. Although not logo specific, this one translates the idea clearly…

Honda recently released a television commercial in which they featured the new 2011 Honda Civic Hybrid. Throughout the commercial it shows a young adult girl going about her daily routine in her new Civic. The curious part of the whole brand message in this television ad was the fact that they chose to portray the girl as a, wait for it… a troll – a monster! Now, they may have been trying to take make a more “earthy” reference here, but the fact is that it can be interpreted in more then one way – and one of those ways is not a favorable one. Who knows a teenage girl who appreciates being referred to as a troll? Conscious and subconscious associations matter, so chose your image wisely and with careful consideration.

Watch the TV spot:

Consider originality – Another common mistake among business owners looking to create some sort of brand around their product or service is to mimic the identity of other businesses of similar construct thinking this copy-cat image will lend to their credibility within their chosen market. Another colossal mistake! This only puts your business identity into a scenario where you it simply blends in with the others in your market. Pharmaceutical drug logo designs are terrible at this. Again, watch the commercials on television and you’ll notice they all seem to look the same, incorporating the same colors and slight variations of a graphic where a circle and an arch form some sort of frolicking figure with arms outstretched.

The savvy business owner understands the tangible benefits of a well-though-out logo. It’s the one element of a business that is at the front lines of the battle of acquiring new patronage, while helping to solidify the relationships with those already acquired.

So what are the core elements that every logo design should incorporate to be an effective business tool and a strong bridge of connectivity with your target audience?

• 1 – Be original, unique
  Is it unique and does it make its own statement?
• 2 – Be flexible, scalable
  Is it a design that can be used and interchanged across multiple platforms of outreach and can it adapt easily to minor changes?
• 3 – Be simple, direct
  Is it simple and clear enough to communicate a clear, concise message?
• 4 – Be memorable
  Is it easy to recall, to remember? – as this is a crucial goal of any company identity.

Elaborating on these would not necessarily be fruitful as each business and each design will be targeted differently. The key is to always consider the above four elements.

Henry Ford once said, “Every object tells a story, if we know how to read it.” In many cases that story is design. From the toothbrush we use in the morning to the tablet we read on the metro to work it’s purpose, it’s meaning is often defined by the manner in which we chose to interact or receive it’s message. Design is an integral role in how we use, discern and make decisions on items we interact with on a day-to-day basis. Whether from a cognitive or subconscious level, each object has a way of creating associations with how we categorize, define and use it.

This holds even more true when it comes to graphic design. Every piece is designed with a uniquely specific purpose in mind. Some focus on getting your attention, others offer a more intellectual approach to how the piece translates it’s message. Regardless of the end goal, the story should still be there.

A well designed logo should not just identify a brand, but do so by telling it’s viewer a brief story. Some of these stories might be evident, some may not. In some cases, purposeful narratives may focus on translating a message to the employees of a company where other designs might incorporate a narrative more directed at those looking into the company from the outside – their target audience. Often, the most interesting part of a logo or company identity is knowing how the company and designer ended up with the concept that they did. Why they chose certain associations, imagery or text to translate their message, what exactly is the message, and why they wanted that story transferred to their viewers.

A narrative can significantly bolster the design by provide a deeper understanding of the logo, poster, brochure or other through a simple narrative. Great works of art throughout the years are often viewed by the public in museums, but many who see them don’t gain the true essence or appreciation of a piece unless they read or educated themselves on their historical significance or the artist background. For example, would one truly gain an appreciation for a Van Gogh’s self portrait with one bandaged ear if they weren’t aware of his personal struggles of epilepsy, bipolar disorder among other ailments that drove unique characteristics to many of his later paintings. This is that story, that narrative – albeit a bit extreme in nature.

So, take a look around you and as you interact with the tings around you, try to discover their narratives. Whether the utensils on the table at lunch or the brands you choose to interact with. A message is there – it would be a shame to miss it.